March 16, 2009

AIG Fesses Up

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So where has all that taxpayer cash that’s been shoveled into AIG gone?  Today they revealed their largest counterparties, and the top 5 — drum roll, please — are:

  • Goldman Sachs: $12.9 billion
  • Bank of America + Merrill Lynch: $12.0 billion
  • Société Générale: $11.9 billion
  • Deutsche Bank: $11.8 billion
  • Barclays: $8.5 billion

So it looks like everyone was right: Goldman did have enormous exposure to AIG and foreign banks did get massive dollops of aid from the bailout.  No wonder Lloyd Blankfein and Christine Lagarde took such a keen personal interest in AIG’s fortunes.

UPDATE: The AIG memo contains four appendices that list amounts paid out to various creditors.  I just added them up to get the numbers above, but Felix Salmon says that amounts to adding up apples and oranges.  The real action, he says, is solely in Appendix 2, which gives us a different top 5:

  • Société Générale: $6.9 billion
  • Goldman Sachs: $5.6 billion
  • Merrill Lynch: $3.1 billion
  • Deutsche Bank: $2.8 billion
  • UBS: $2.5 billion

There’s more to it than this, though.  Read Felix for more details on why further transparency is still needed.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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